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Wiring a ceiling fan - help!

I have an older house & am replacing a ceiling fan w/light. There is a black & a white wire coming from the ceiling, but no green/ground wire. On the old fan that was up, the green wire from the ceiling fan was connected to the white going into the ceiling. I did the same thing when I hung the fan/light today, but now I'm afraid I've done something horribly wrong. Help?!

What you have done is installed a fan without grounding. For the first 80 years or so, all electrical wiring was done without grounding. It was added as a safety measure after that, and now is standard.

Grounding means the outside metal parts of the appliance are connected back to the ground point and the neutral, so that if a hot wire comes loose and touches a metal part, it will short out and blow the circuit breaker. Without grounding, the loose hot wire might just make the exposed metal part hot, and if someone touches it while grounded (touching a water pipe, standing on a wet floor, etc.), they could provide a path for electricity thru their body, thus getting shocked.

In your case, the risk is probably small, because:

- modern ceiling fans are mostly plastic, with few exposed metal parts, and

- ceiling fans are mounted high, and moving -- people are unlikely to be touching them.

Thanks for the help. Question...should I have connected the green wires with tthe white ones, or should I have just connected them together?...(there was one on each of the 2 parts of the mounting unit, but nothing going into the fan or the ceiling)